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Generative Art – Week 4

Four weeks ago, I started doing daily generative art Processing sketches – and now I am at the end of this fourth week. I’m glad I held on to the “do one sketch every day” mantra, even when I wasn’t feeling inspired – I made some pretty fun stuff this week. Alright, let’s dive right in!

#022: Tentapus Generator

That’s right – it has 10 legs, not 8! I really like how the legs always look so different. While generating, sometimes it almost looked like it was dancing. I might actually use this in a game one day – it certainly looks like it would be fun to play with.

#023: Thorny Path

A rehash of #022. Looks kind of plant/thorn-like.

#024: Fruity Planets

One of the absurdest things I ever made and definitely the star of this week! It was so much fun generating images and thinking up stories for the different planets. The basic concept of “planet with a radial collage” is taken from the amazing book Generative Design which I cannot recommend highly enough. The original images were dedicated to the Public Domain and are taken from http://creativecommons.photos.

The first of these pictures even recieved a small poem by my friend Marina Bahlke:

With silent steps the tigers try to walktheir applejuicy-drippy paws make stalk--ing antelopes way too hardthey sizzle, crackle, slosh and crunchand before having air as lunch…

…they enjoyed a fine meal in one of the palaces and lived happily ever after.

Thanks a lot! That’s already the second piece of fanfiction I get for making, uh, “art”.

#025: New Emoticons For A New Century

Because the old emoticons were boring, our robot overlords have generated new ones. Rejoice! (What do you mean, you can’t type a reverse F on your keyboard? Get a better one!)

This might not look like it, but of all my generative art dailies, this has taken the most work. I actually revisited it multiple times on following days to add things, like a hat or side decorations. It was fiddly to get right, but I am very pleased with the results!

#026: A Handful Of Characters

The title already alludes to it: What you are seeing there isn’t drawn from simple lines and curves, but composed out of font symbols that aren’t necessilary looking like the normal letters of the alphabet. The resulting images are interesting – and what’s more, it offered me an excuseto use my beloved fonts Mara’s Eye, Mage Script and Were Wolf, haha.

#027: FormWeaver

Another part of the Weaver series (see #09 and #09b), experimenting with drawing faint lines between points. This time, the results look a bit like linen spanned between points and illuminated from behind.

#028: Isles

A shiny sea-with-isles generator. I think it’s a worthy end to my 4-week-daily series!

If you’re not on Windows, fret not; for some reason I can’t compile for Mac and Linux, but you can just download Processing and open the sketch files. It’s really straightforward. If you need any help doing that, just send me a mail or comment here.

And what does the future hold?

I already mentioned that this marks the end of my series of dailies. It’s not because I’m out of ideas and even less because I’m getting bored of it: Quite the contrary on both accounts! The reason is simply that the dailies eat a lot of time that I would sometimes rather spend researching generative art techniques – and that I have several ideas that don’t fit into the daily format. So from now on, you can expect bigger results. Thanks for reading, and please join me next time too!